Thomas Pynchon’s Last Hurrah
Looking Forward to "Shadow Ticket"
In some of my previous writing I’ve focussed on the late work of some artistic titans. It’s something that has long fascinated me – great careers that lie forgotten or unexamined, the hidden gems that people pass over or the failures that they rightfully forget. Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast You Must Remember This has a whole new season about the how the directorial icons of Hollywood’s early decades – Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder – floundered in the 60s and 70s, unable to adapt to the industry’s changing norms and audience’s changing tastes. Something similar happened to Francis Ford Coppola with last year’s flop-masterpiece Megalopolis; here was another genius, either way behind the times, or, in my opinion, too far ahead of them.
Music seems to a kinder medium for artistic giants compared to film. There’s less money on the line, less pressure for immediate success, and more leeway granted to the greats. In Neil Young’s words, ‘it’s better to burn out than to fade away,’ but fade away is exactly what the musicians of that generation are doing, including Young himself. Albums come out and are politely received, but I don’t know anyone who’s given Neil Young’s Barn more than a few spins. Oftentimes, longevity is seen as a sign of merit. Who would have expected The Rolling Stones (and Keith Richards specifically) to be touring into their 80s? Willie Nelson, seemingly kept alive into his nineties with the aid of copious amounts of marijuana, is still coming out with an album every year, but they never seem to get beyond being ‘quite good’. The obvious counterexample is Dylan, who is better than ever – as I can personally attest having seen him perform majestically, albeit slightly grumpily in Prague last year. By reaching further and further into the past, including a three-album detour into the Great American Songbook and Sinatra-style crooner classics, he has paradoxically stayed fresh, refusing to succumb to the day’s trends, a mistake that led to a bleak 80s output for even the best of the 60s rockstars.
Literature is perhaps kinder still. Artistic fadeout also happens, but since the novel itself is fading out, it seems to matter less. Some authors like Phillip Roth, announce their retirement, ending their career on a high note. Others stop writing and no one really notices, but in general, there are few outright disasters or embarrassments. Cormac McCarthy published two final books in 2022, at the age of 89, and it looked like he had left behind a lasting legacy. In the triple obituary that I wrote upon his death, I argued that he was amongst the last in the last generation of writers, and that he would be remembered as such. Since then, however, his legacy has become far murkier with a recent Vanity Fair article recounting the love affair he started with a 16 year-old girl when he was 42, and a forthcoming biography promises more unseemly revelations.
So, it was an utter surprise to see that, just when the American literary flame was on the brink of being extinguished, another literary giant has stepped up. Thomas Pynchon, writer of complex, funny, erudite, postmodern doorstoppers like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason and Dixon, was back his first book in twelve years and its called Shadow Ticket. There had been rumblings of a new Pynchon novel for years – I remember incredulously reading a Reddit post a few years back by someone claiming to be in the ‘New York publishing world’ that a new Pynchon book was coming, and that it was going to be great. Yet the odds seemed to be against that happening. Pynchon was well into his 80s and although he never seemed to be the type to just stop writing, the selling of his papers to the Huntingdon Library seemed like a final chapter. Yet, within the Huntingdon press release was a delicious morsel – ‘Comprising 70 linear feet of materials created between the late 1950s and the 2020s—including typescripts and drafts of each of his novels, handwritten notes, correspondence, and research’. That seemed to imply that the writer was still working on something even in recent years. Moreover, the press release also carefully stated that Pynchon was the author of ‘eight novels thus far’, meaning that perhaps a new one was on the way.
Selling his archive was already quite unexpected for Pynchon, given he is famously reclusive, doesn’t give interviews, and there are only a few pictures of him on the internet, mostly dating from his high school and college days. Yet, in some ways it was gearing up to be a big few years for the writer. Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of the excellent Pynchon adaption Inherent Vice was making a loose adaptation of Pynchon’s novel Vineland, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Pynchon’s dyspeptic analysis of American life was proving evermore prophetic – now seemed to be the perfect time to announce a new book.
We don’t know much about Shadow Ticket so far, a cover hasn’t even been released. Yet, a quick look at the synopsis seems to confirm that it was form a loose trilogy with Pynchon’s two previous novels Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. Both were denounced as ‘Pynchon-lite’ upon release, lacking the depth of some of his previous books – yet diet Pynchon beats the full-fat version of other writers any day. Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge were detective stories, meaning that the reader had something to grab onto, and that they had a more linear, yet still Pynchonesque plot. Inherent Vice was set in the dying days of hippiedom and was heavier on the comedy that usual, whilst Bleeding Edge was Pynchon’s 9/11 novel, his foray into the more recent past, and a surprisingly touching book about family. Shadow Ticket continues in that vein. The page count is a manageable 400 or so pages, and the story revolves around a private investigator during the height of the Great Depression.
I’ll leave you with the publisher’s description of the novel, due for release on October 7th 2025.
‘Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.’
A paragraph like that could only be written by Pynchon itself, and it gets me, and countless other fans, excited for publication day.
This article originally appeared in Interkom magazine.